[DICKENS, CHARLES]. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Chapman and Hall, MDCCCXLIV. [1844].
FIRST EDITION, first issue in book form, with the frontispiece sign reading "100£", a 14 line errata, and the end of the preface dated "twenty-fifth June 1844". Leather-bound, hardcover, octavo (22.5 x 14 x 5cm), pp. [xiv], [2] errata leaf, 624. English text, with forty etched plates including frontispiece and title-page vignette by Hablot K. Browne aka "Phiz". Stunning Cosway-style binding by Dieter Rader of the Dragon Press Bindery (stamp-signed in gilt on front turn-in), bound in full dark green crushed morocco gilt, covers ruled and tooled in gilt, front cover with a central oval hand-painted portrait miniature of exceptional quality (8.5 x 6.5cm) of Charles Dickens set under glass. Spine with five raised bands elaborately tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments. Wide gilt turn-ins with corner-pieces, marbled liners and endleaves, all edges gilt. Condition: FINE. An immaculate copy, else for some faint spotting to some plates. Scarce thus.
Note: First edition, first issue in book form of this famous work, presented in a wonderful Cosway-style binding by Dieter Rader of the Dragon Press Bindery. Dickens's biographer places Martin Chuzzlewit as marking "a great change in Dickens's conception of moral characteristics. For the first time Dickens begins to explore the contradictions and difficulties of the contemporary human world; these are no longer figures defined by a single characteristic or animated by the wilful principle of a 'humour', but ones who are seen to change with the changing world, to live and grow" (Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 392). Dickens wrote to a contemporary that "I think Chuzzlewit is a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories" (cited in Berard, Dickens and Landscape Discourse, p. 3). Smith I, 7; Hatton and Cleaver pp. 183-212.
